Mordechai Richler The Street 1969
... Mordechai Richler is a Canadian novelist, journalist and occasional scriptwriter of Jewish decent who was born in Montreal in 1931 and grew up there on St Urbain Street. ... The novel that established Richler as a novelist was The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), but other works such as Joshua Now and Then (1980) and Solomon Gursky Was Here were also given critical acclaim. ... Richler in his short story The Street, which was published in the collection of short stories with the same name in 1969, illustrates the atmosphere in this Jewish ghetto, the mediocre working conditions of the peddlers and what it meant to have a Jewish identity at that time. ... While Jewish life in Montreal is set on St Urbain Street and while the latter is situated in a working class area and even referred to as the “ghetto”, life in Europe is referred to as life “beyond the ghetto” where the narrator broadened his mind through travelling and aimed at refining his taste and character. ... Later in the 50ies St Urbain Street began to blossom as more educated and well-to-do Jews were admitted and more Jews moved on with the help of their solid work ethic. ... While the one prominent theme of The Street is how a Jewish identity is established, another important one is the relationships between the Jews and other cultural groups. ... Richler’s short story The Street gives us a clear picture of how Jews in Canada saw themselves and how they shaped their identity of being an immigrant community.